Your Well-Fed Reporter is a bona fide sucker for a particular pasta dish that is made with sheets of pasta and layers of meat sauce, bechemel sauce and tomato sauce.

His passionate devotion to lasagna is well documented and most likely dates back to his childhood, when such dishes were consider haute cuisine. It’s a passion he passed on to his Well-Fed Daughter.

So when he received word recently that a restaurant in Baldwin County was an especially seasoned practitioner of the lasagna arts, he wasted no time in seeking it out.

Pizzeria Ozio is located at 697 U.S. 98 in Daphne. Moseley’s Meat Market is its next-door neighbor.

Ozio offers top-shelf Italian cuisine, the sort found in larger cities with large Italian populations.

Ozio opened its doors in the summer of 2009, the brainchild of owner Eric Leath, who wanted to spread his passion for pizza-making to the folks in Lower Alabama. The Pensacola native sought to offer the incredibly thin, crisp pizzas popular in the northeast.

“I’ve been making pizza all my life, and I found myself increasingly frustrated with the lack of availability of traditional pizza in our area,” said Leath.

When he got really serious about pizza-making, he journeyed to what he believes is the nexus of old-style pizza — the northeastern United States.

View full size(Press-Register/John David Mercer)The cuisine is varied at Pizzeria Ozio in Daphne, Ala.

“I learned from the pros up there,” he said.

More on the pizzas in a minute.

Ozio wasn’t especially busy on this recent dining journey. But not crowded is good when you have in tow the sort of miscreant that WFR had brought along: the ever-petulant, ever-unhappy Surly Companion.

Your professional dining correspondent chose a seat off to the side of the spacious dining room, a tiny two-top table tucked into a corner. He took the seat against the wall, the better from which to survey the room.

The duo studied the menu and, as luck would have it, WFR had selected a day when he could assuage his lust for lasagna. It was one of the daily lunch specials, which come with a fresh garden salad and bread for the princely sum of $5.95.

His menu selection made quickly, WFR then set out to aid his unschooled chum, who had his heart set on pizza.

The grouchy one’s brow furrowed. There was no meat lover’s pizza on the menu. No chicken-bacon-ranch calorie bomb. No pepperoni lover’s pie with extra cheese packed into the crust. Instead Surly was confronted by names like Napolitana, Margherita, Gardino and Bianca.

The emphasis was clearly on old-school ingredients: Kalamata olives, mozzarella, fennel sausage, arugula, sopressata. Under WFR’s guidance, Surly went with the Salumi, a straightforward build with tomato sauce, mozzarella, pepperoni and sausage.

At $14, it didn’t make for a particularly cheap lunch. But it depends on how you figure it: Surly had a couple of pieces and shared some with WFR, then toted the rest home and put it out for the Surly young’uns at dinnertime. WFR hears that part of the proceedings will be featured on an upcoming episode of some Discovery Channel survival show.

Suffice to say that the Salumi satisfied some outsize (yet picky) appetites. It would be a lie to pass this off as a light pizza — but since its rich, flavorful toppings were laid out on a wafer of a crust, it was nicely balanced. It filled Surly up without putting him in a coma, which is a neat trick where this gourmand is involved.

WFR’s salad was very light and bright with just enough Italian dressing to give it a slight edge. It was topped with sliced tomatoes that were picked at the peak of perfection — red, ripe and juicy. Yummy.

The generous serving of lasagna, arrived not too long after WFR was sopping up the last bit of dressing with a crumb of bread.

Lasagna noodles are, by nature, testy beasts. They normally have to be a tad thick to hold up to the rigors of such a rich, heady meal as lasagna. Getting them to the right consistency requires skill.

But these thin sheets of pasta were so incredibly tender that WFR was caught off guard. It was, indeed, an incredible dish bearing no resemblance at all to the prefab lasagnas that come frozen in the grocery store.

When told of WFR’s ardor for his lasagna, Leath was grateful for the compliment, but said it was the result of lots of hard work and experimentation.

“Our lasagna is not like you find anywhere else,” he said. Credit goes to the very thin pasta that he discovered by “playing around at home by putting the pasta press on the thinnest layer we could.”

Leath uses his own bolognese sauce, which isn’t very heavy on tomatoes. The cheeses are Parmesan, Romano and mozzarella, he said.

One offering on the appetizer menu jumped out and grabbed WFR by the lapels — olive fritte, “fried Spanish olives with garlic and California almonds.

Atmosphere: Open and very relaxed with a spacious bar at one end of the room.

Signature dishes: Ozio bills itself as a pizzeria serving traditional New England-style pies. And it is, with some significant bonuses. Their homemade pastas are light and delicate and steaks are hand-cut. Sandwiches are served on New Orleans’ own Leidenheimer bread and burgers are served “old-fashioned” with lots of TLC.

Prices: Most appetizers run $7-$9, salads $5-$10, seafood dishes around $9 and most sandwiches $8. Pasta dishes run $8-$12, and pizzas start at $12. Upscale entrees top out with the $25 rib-eye, grilled and served with blue cheese fritter.

In short: Go for the pizzas, but when you go back, promise yourself you will explore the rest of the menu — including the very tempting Sunday brunch.

“I first had this dish in Napa Valley (California) and fell in love with it. It’s a delightful little appetizer that is sort of like popcorn,” Leath said.

Leath described the menu as a “work in progress” and he said he continues to tweak the operation. Just last week, for instance, they kicked off a new happy hour tapas menu that offers a host of small tastings.

As promised, we go back to the pizzas. Leath said the Ozio process is not easy, but it’s an approach they’ve streamlined for speedy service. The pizzas are cooked at extreme temperatures, he said, resulting in a slightly charred bottom that makes for a very crispy crust.

Ozio offers a large array of pizzas, but Leath said the sausage and pepper pizza is among his best-sellers.